大象传媒

Part 3 of 3 parts

Continued from A8118803

After we were bombed out, and during the time we were at our grandparents, we children slept in the shelter with my mother and father, and our grandparents slept indoors. Once during that time, we went into a local park where a doodlebug had dropped and exploded and my only real recollection is of all the trees being bare of leaves with their trunks all split and bent over.

During the war any houses which were empty due to people having gone away or which were to let or for sale were requisitioned by the Authorities for just such emergencies as that which we found ourselves in. The particular one which my parents were offered was at a place called Coney Hall, a small village about four miles away from our bombed house. We went on the bus to see the house before moving in to it and as we were walking down the road on the way there, a DoodleBug suddenly appeared overhead and its engine stopped. Now when the Doodlebug engine stopped, they were known to do one of two things, they either nose-dived virtually straight down, or they glided onwards for some distance. You always hoped that they would keep gliding although of course this was not very friendly when you consider that it meant that meant someone else would get it.

We had always been told when bombs were dropping close by to lay down flat on the ground but with your chest off lifted off the ground to prevent internal damage from concussion. On this occasion, although all the rest of the family obeyed my father's instructions to GET DOWN I completely forgot all I had been told and remained standing up with my eyes shut and my hands pressed tightly over my ears. Luckily for us (but not someone else) the bomb carried on. However I got told off for staying upright.

When we finally got to the house, we children thought it was great for the front of the house looked out across the fields and there were cows in the field opposite, a new thing for me as I had only ever seen them in books before. The best part however was that it had a bathroom with hot water on tap, for at our old house, we had always had to bathe in the tin bath in the living room before.

When we were first looking round the house, I went upstairs to look in the bathroom, and to my amazement there was a well-drawn pencil sketch of a nude woman on the wall which to me as a nine-year-old was a fantastic piece of work. However when my mother found me standing admiring it I was soon ushered downstairs. The hot water was supplied from a boiler behind the fire in the living room, which meant that we could have baths very easily without lugging hot water in buckets. The drawback was that the house only had two bedrooms, which meant we three children had to sleep in the back bedroom while my parents slept in the front bedroom. The thing about the back bedroom was that it faced straight out towards the area from which the majority of the Doodlebugs came so that on a clear day you could see them coming from about 5 miles away up what was known as Bomb Alley.

The area around the requisitioned house that we moved into had been a training ground for soldiers and the house had been occupied by some Canadian Soldiers before we went there. On looking back I realise now that those same soldiers were probably at that time in France, for D-Day had taken place a few days before.

We had to wait a week or so until the place had been decorated before we moved in. This was my first encounter with the decorating material known as Distemper and when we moved in the walls had been distempered and the house had this strange awful smell. Of course the nude in the bathroom disappeared in the process. Our Parents told us that our furniture was moved from our bombed out house to the new abode by soldiers using an army truck, and apparently one soldier sat on the back during the journey playing my mothers piano. Talking of which reminds me that for a long time after being bombed out, we had to be very careful for much of the furniture had small slivers of glass embedded in it and it was very easy to cut yourself on the tiny protruding edges. The Piano springs to mind especially for I well recall that one day whilst my mother was polishing the piano, the cloth tore on the glass embedded in the front of the piano.

When we were bombed out, we lost a lot of our belongings but we were able to get extra clothes and bedding from distribution depots in Beckenham. These clothes and bedding had been supplied by the Canadian Red Cross and one thing which always springs to mind when I think about it was the Paisley pattern on the eiderdowns. Some days after we had been bombed out, we went back to our damaged house to see if we could rescue any of our belongings such as clothes etc. Amongst some things, which I managed to retrieve, were two Dinky toy cars, which were on a small ledge under the dining table. However one large model car which had been my favourite was nowhere to be seen.

The requisitioned house was situated on the edge of an estate of houses and bungalows which had only been built a few years before the war and which were obviously intended for middle class families for they all had garages. In the garage of the house we were in, was an inspection pit, and my father used that as a storage for the coke which was burnt on the fire. For some reason, probably cost, very little coal was burnt in our house; it was always coke, coal only being used to start the fire off.

Old wood such as rafters and doorframes from bombed buildings used to be collected by the Council and distributed for people to use as firewood. Once a week a lorry would appear and tip this scarred and blackened offering onto the grass area outside our house and there would the be a mad rush by all the neighbours to get as much as possible, for of course it saved money.

There were blackout shutters in each room which had been made by the army whilst they were in occupation. These shutters were constructed of some kind of strawboard on wooden frames and were very strong. These shutters clipped into place by turnbuckles, which made them very easy to put up.

I soon struck up acquaintances with other boys of my age who lived just a few doors away, and we had great fun building camps in the hedge which ran between the field opposite and the road where we lived. They also soon showed me all the other good playgrounds, which were around, and we roamed far and wide through the woods playing and enjoying ourselves. To me this was really good, for I had always lived in town and this sort of life was great to me.

Often after a night raid we used to find strips of silver paper, which we were told was for runners to follow like a paper chase. Of course at a later date I found out that it was dropped to outwit the radar, which we knew nothing about at the time.

All this was taking place with the war still going on, and although there was no bombing by planes we still had the Doodlebugs to worry about. However there soon came a new menace which you could not see, the V2 rocket. This just came out of the blue with no warning and no one saw then come down. However having said that nobody ever saw a V2, one day, I DID see one, even if only for a split second. I was walking down the road and happened to look over towards Bromley when I saw a streak of light and next minute saw a great cloud of smoke go up, so I can honestly say that I saw a V2.

One day we were out playing in the field opposite when we saw lots of planes going over towing other planes which we found out afterwards were gliders. They seemed to go on for hours and probably did for all I can recall. However since D-Day had taken place sometime earlier, I do not know where they were going. During the war of course we never went on holiday but I distinctly remember going on a bus from Bromley to Sevenoaks, and during the journey we saw hundreds of barrage balloons above the fields. These had been moved out from the parks nearer to London in order to catch the Doodlebugs and bring them down before they reached the built-up outer suburbs of London.

One of the things that my newfound friends showed me was in the local churchyard was a grave for several local firemen who had lost their lives fighting fires in the London Blitz of 1940. There was also one for three local boys who had found an unexploded mortar bomb, and because it was too heavy to carry, decided to attach a rope to it and drag it along the road. Unfortunately for them the bomb did not like the bumps in the road and it blew up, taking them with it. However children never learn, for a couple of years later one of the boys who showed me the grave, himself found a live cannon shell while holding it close to his stomach in attempting to remove the bullet from the cartridge, caused the shell to explode causing his early demise.

Just down the road from the requisitioned house was a large building called Wickham Court which had been the home at one time of Anne Boleyn and Henry the Eighth. Around this house were large grounds which must have been beautiful in their day but then were very overgrown. The building had been taken over by the army and the grounds which were surrounded by a high brick wall had been used for army training. There were slit trenches in the ground and ropes and rope bridges in the trees. By the time I lived in the area, the army had long gone, and my friends had found they could get down into the grounds over the wall and we had great fun on the ropes etc., but we had to be careful of the caretaker who used to patrol the grounds. As the place was overgrown, you could not her or see him, and one day he caught two of us up an apple tree getting apples. Luckily he just told us off and let us go. One other reminder of the occupation by the army was a burnt out truck in the forecourt and I was told that a schoolboy had decided to throw a lighted match in the petrol tank with the inevitable result.

After we were bombed out and had moved to the requisitioned house, I was taken to the local school down the road in order to restart my education. I was taken into the Headmaster, Mr. Kidwell, and my father had to explain that I had not been to school for six months or so. I was put into a class where the teacher, Miss Bishop, had a fianc茅e who was an airman and one day she was very upset and had been crying and we found out that he had been killed. Only three things really stand out during the two years I as at that school, one was putting bent pins on cotton tied to a cork into the school fishpond to try and catch the goldfish. Second was seeing an eclipse of the sun for the first time, and a third day stands out particularly for the teacher pointed out that the date was an unusual one. The date in question being 12 March 1945 i.e. (12345)

After the war was over, and as street lighting returned we found that the road we lived in was gas-lit which we found strange. Also when the lighting and neon advertising were switched on again, our parents took us up to London especially to see the lights around Piccadilly which had been relit and that was the first time I had ever seen Neon lights.

In 1947 there was a long period of heavy frost and then deep snow and we children had great fun sledging, even late in the evening in the dark. We used to make sledges from Coop milk crates which at that time had the main part constructed of two galvanised steel tubular frames curved at the top like sledge runners and with a square frame attached on the base. By taking out the interior part i.e. the bottle holders, and turning the remaining frame upside down it provided a perfect sledge albeit only about eighteen inches square. However ingenuity being what it is, we soon found that by tying two crates end to end it made a perfect sledge in all respects. I must add that three or even four crates tied together end to end were not unknown.

During that bad winter of 1947, due to the fact that heating in the house was poor (as it always was in those days), one night the lead pipes in the loft froze up. When they thawed out, there was a split and water was flooding all over the loft and running down the light fitting in our bedroom.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, even though we had been bombed out, my father was still having to pay the mortgage on the damaged house as well as paying rent for the requisitioned house. As a result in late 1946, after the war was over my father set about trying to get our house repaired under the terms of compensation from the War Damage Commission. I have since found out that at first all that they were prepared to offer was 拢100 compensation, but that this would not involve any repair work to the structure at all, and in addition he would relinquish ownership of the property. I had never thought that my father was a particularly stubborn person, but the next couple of years were to prove to me how wrong I was. My father then set about a consistent correspondence backed up with arguments to prove how much hardship this offer would produce since not only was he paying rent for the requisitioned house we were living in, but he was still having to pay the mortgage for the bombed house.

He felt that it was his right that the house should be repaired under the auspices of the War Damages Commission and after a lot of argument on both sides, it was finally agreed that the Commission would finance the complete repair of the house and this was agreed. What my Father did manage to get agreement to in addition was that by taking on a further small mortgage he would provide additional money which would permit the construction of an internal bathroom and toilet during the repairs.

Sometime during 1948, the house having been repaired, we moved back to the house in Beckenham, and this brought to an end my involvement with World war Two.

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